Penal Violence in Spaces of Precarity

Abstract: Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s argument that liberal law is founded on and preserved through violence and on Hannah Arendt’s and Frantz Fanon’s ideas on the unpredictability of violence, this article uses the term penal violence to highlight the violence of lawful (state) punishment and the overlaps between different forms of lawful state violence and extralegal/extrajudicial violence. Focusing on South Africa, I argue that there is an ever-present possibility of law’s (legal) violence transgressing its own fictitious boundary (of reasonableness and nonviolence) and spiraling into unlawful (excessive and visible) violence. Adopting a multiscalar spatiotemporal approach to analyze extralegal violence by civilians in informal settlements, by the police when they engage in unlawful violence, and by prison wardens when they inflict excessive violence inside prisons, I emphasize the connections between law and violence, those between punishment and vengeance, and the malleability of violence.